Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

It was great fun meeting him again, and he hadn’t changed at all from how I remembered him - he kindly came to pick me up from the bus station, and after a quick stop at the local primary school for his girlfriend to vote on the gun law referendum (on whether or not to continue allowing guns to be sold in Brazil - the final outcome was to continue selling them, although this has been interpreted as a vote against the government more than anything else), we headed over to an airfield to see an airshow. The airshow never happened, but we did get to see lots of planes, talk to an apprentice pilot and see Peter’s new plot of land, located nearby. The next day I walked around Porto Alegre, and got to see the Gazometro, a converted energy plant now serving as an art gallery space - I was sure I had been there before, but couldn’t remember how or when - after a while I remembered that we had spent an afternoon there with my family the last time we visited Peter, over seven years ago…

On my last night in Porto Alegre, Peter invited my cousins Patricia, Marilia (and her boyfriend Fernando) and Pepe over to dinner - I hadn’t seen them in as much time as my uncle, and fortunately my Spanish was a bit better this time than last, so we did actually manage to communicate a little this time. It was great catching up, and seeing how everyone had changed - especially Pepe, who was 10 last time I had seen him…

[1]http://nick-curry.com/pix/v/SouthAmerica2005/Brazil/PortoAlegre/

posted by Nick at 1:47 pm

Saturday, October 22, 2005

My “last nite”:1 was absolutely great, four of us from the hotel headed over to the launch party for Mathias’s girlfriend’s archaeology review, and had a great time until the early hours of the next day… A great way to leave, with great memories…

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Yesterday evening we went to see one of the strangest things I think I have experienced so far - the world’s oddest Tango show.

We were looking for an affordable show and, after wandering through the city and finding either full or horrendously expensive places, we landed in a place called Opera Show - a tango show featuring a dancing couple, a male tango singer and a female tango singer, an opera singer and a ’surprise guest’. Now this sounds fairly innocuous, although the opera singer and the surprise guest should really have ticked us off - this was a show that David Lynch would have been proud of.

When we got in, we realised only three other tables were taken. The decor featured a felt curtain, a chair and a coat hanger - the first act we saw were the tango dancers, the male lead bearing an uncanny resemblance to my gay driving teacher (minus green-rimmed glasses), thereby taking a lot of the conviction out of the steamy male-female interaction key to tango. The male and female tango singers were also not very good; the opera singer, completely out of place in a tango show, looked like he had been airlifted directly out of his native Bavaria without even being given the time to shave off his moustache, and had the bad luck of having a mouth that made him look like a surprised fish. But the real star attraction was the ’surprise guest’ - an obviouly demented woman whose _numero_ consisted of dancing with a coathanger. Unfortunately, in a failing to the Lynchian tradition that this spectacle was obviously an homage to, the one-eyed dwarf never made his appearance - but then we didn’t stay to the end, so maybe he did…

Sunday, October 16, 2005

We sat in the River side of the stadium (Boca fans had only been allocated 4500 seats), in the seated sections (the “populares” were the first to sell out). The game itself was OK but not great - both teams were too fielded in recent years. However the fans were the stars of the show - the stadium was filled to capacity (65000), and I greatly extended my repertoire of Spanish insults thanks to the encyclopedic knowledge of my fellow supporters. I had also never seen a father so enthusiastically exhorting his 10 year-old son to shout profanities - all in all it was great fun, a great chance to see the kind of enthusiasm for football still unique to Latin America.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

I’ll probably be spending a week or so here, enjoying such modern ameneties as hot showers and meals not consisting solely of chicken, rice, and potates, before heading up north to Porto Allegre and then to Rio…

The city so far seems amazing - kind of like how I imagined Paris being in the 1930s, with artists everywhere, a great atmosphere, great cafes and bars, great food - and better weather (Spring just started here). Am looking forward to this…

posted by Nick at 2:00 pm

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

This area was relatively tourist-free, but I bumped into an Italian and a Dutch who were attempting a trip into the nearby “Kaa-Iya National Park”:1. Despite being Latin America’s largest park in terms of surface, Kaa-Iya is not open to tourists (although the planned construction of a tourist bungalow could change this); by sheer luck, we were granted authorisation to visit the parc, and even though we didn’t see as much wildlife as we had hoped, we did spend one great night by a natural well admiring the sound and light show created by fireflies and other insects.